Cinnabar Shadows (10 page)

Pavek caught Ruari at the elbows from behind and steered him to one side. For all his sullenness and
swagger, for all his hatred of Urik and the human templar who, in raping his elven mother, had become his
father, Ruari was an innocent raised in the clean, free air of Quraite. He knew elves and dwarves and
humans and their mixed-blood offspring, but nothing of the more exotic races or the impulses that might
drive a woman to mark her body, or wrap it in a gown tight enough to be a second skin and cut with holes
to display what the women of Quraite kept discreetly covered.

A templar, though, had seen everything the underside of Urik had to offer—or Pavek thought he had
until he squatted down for a better look at what Ruari had found. She was beyond doubt a woman: leaner
than Ruari or a full-blooded elf, but not an elf, not at all. Her skin wasn't painted; white-as-salt was its
natural color, despite the punishment it must have taken on the journey. Pavek couldn't say whether the
marks around her eyes were paint or not, but the eyes themselves were wide-spaced and the mask that ran
the length of her face between them covered no recognizable profile. He'd never seen anyone like her
before, but he knew what she was—

"New Race."

"What?" Ruari asked, his curiosity calming him already.

"Rotters," Zvain interrupted. He left off searching, but didn't come all the way over to join them.
"Better be careful, they're beasts for the arena. Things that got made, not born. Claws and teeth and other
things they shouldn't have. Rotters."

"Most of em," Pavek agreed, sounding wiser than he felt and wondering if the boy knew something that
he didn't. The white-skinned woman with her mask and torn gown appeared more fragile than ferocious.
As the wheels of fate's chariot spun, he knew that appearances meant nothing, but if this was the woman
Akashia had sensed, he wanted to preserve the peace as long as he could. "They stay beasts, if they start
out beasts. If they start as men and women, that's what they come out as, but different. And they don't all
choose to go to the Tower. Some do; they've got their reasons, I guess. Mostly it's slavers that take a coffle
chain south and bring back the few that come out again." Time and time again during Pavek's years as a
templar, the civil bureau had swept through the slave markets in search of the lowest of the low who
supplied the mysterious Tower. Maybe they saved a few slaves from transformation, but they did nothing
for the ones who'd been transformed.

"Come from where? Come out how? What Tower?" Ruari pressed. "I know elves and half-elves;
she's neither. Wind and fire, Pavek, her skin—She's got scales! I felt them. What race of man and woman
has scales?"

Pavek shook his head. "Just her, I imagine. Haven't seen many of them, but I never saw two that were
alike—"

"But you said 'New Race'."

"They're New Race because, man, woman, or beast, they all come from the same place, 'way to the
south. Somewhere south there's a place—the Tower—that takes what it finds and changes it into
something else—"

Pavek sighed. They were young. One of them had seen too much; the other, not enough. All men were
made, women, too. Talk to any templar. "Made, not born. All by themselves, no mothers or fathers, sisters
or brothers. They die, though. Just like the rest of us."

Ruari shuddered. "She's not dead. I heard her—felt her—breathing." He shuddered a second time and
wraped his arms over his chest.

Her eyes were closed and she lay with her arms and legs so twisted that Pavek had taken the worst
for granted. His mastery of druid spellcraft didn't extend this far from the grove and didn't include the
healing arts, but Ruari was a competent druid; he knew enough about healing to keep her alive until they
found Akashia.

Kneeling beside the fallen New Race woman, he held his hands palms out above her breasts and
looked Ruari in his moonlit eyes. "Help me." The words weren't phrased as a request. Ruari shrugged and
twisted until their eyes no longer met. "You're wrong, Ru," Pavek chided coldly. He loosened the length of
fine, dark cloth the woman had wound around her head and shoulders, then he laid his big, callused hands
on her cheek to turn her head and expose the fastenings of her mask.

"Don't!" Zvain shouted.

The boy had finally come closer and taken Pavek's place beside the manifestly uncomfortable Ruari.
Had his arms been long enough, Pavek would have grabbed both of them by their ears and smashed their
stubborn, cowardly skulls together. He might do it anyway, once he'd taken care of the matters at hand.

"Don't touch her!"

He'd be damned first, if he wasn't already. Pavek touched her cold, white skin and found it scaled,
exactly as Ruari had warned, but before he could turn her head, a Zvain-sized force struck his flank,
knocking him backward. Blind rage clouded Pavek's eyes and judgment; he seized the boy's neck and with
trembling fingers began to squeeze.

"She'll blast you, Pavek!" Zvain said desperately. He was a tough, wiry youth, but his hands barely
wrapped around Pavek's brawl-thickened wrists and couldn't loosen them at all. "She'll blast you. I've seen
her do it. I've seen her, Pavek! I've seen her do it."

With a gasp of horror, Pavek heard the boy's words, saw what he, himself, had been doing. His
strength vanished with his rage. Limp hands at the end of limp arms fell against his thighs. Zvain scampered
away, rubbing his neck, but otherwise no worse for the assault. Pavek was too shamed to speak, so Ruari
asked the obvious question:

"Where did you see her?"

Shame was, apparently, contagious. Zvain tucked his chin against his breastbone. "I told you she was a
rotter. I told you. She'd come to—you know—that house, almost every night."

Pavek let the last of his breath out with a sigh. "Escrissar? You saw her while you were living with
Escrissar?" He swore a heartfelt oath as the boy nodded.

"She's got a power, even he couldn't get around it, and she doesn't like anyone to touch that mask."

"What was she doing at House Escrissar?" Ruari demanded, his teeth were clenched and his hands
were drawn up into compact fists. He'd never forgive or forget what had happened to Akashia in House
Escrissar; none of them would. Lord Hamanu had exacted a fatal price from his high templar pet without
slacking Quraite's thirst for vengeance.

Zvain didn't answer the question. He didn't willingly answer any questions about Elabon Escrissar or his
household. Akashia remembered him from her own nightmare interrogations. That was enough for her, but
Pavek, who knew the deadhearts better and despised them no less, suspected Zvain had endured his own
torments as well as Akashia's.

"What was she doing there?" Ruari repeated; Zvain withdrew deeper into himself.

"He doesn't know," Pavek shouted. "Let it lie, Ru! He doesn't know. She can tell us herself when we
get her to the village—"

"You're not taking her where Kashi'll see her?"

Pavek didn't need the half-elf's indignation to tell him that it was a bad idea. He knew enough about
women to know there were some you didn't put together unless you wanted to witness a tooth-and-nail
fight. If he had half the wit of a stone-struck baazrag, he'd haul himself into one of the empty saddles and
head south with Lord Hamanu's message and the New Race woman in tow behind him, but having only the
wit of a man, he lifted the woman and started toward Quraite instead.

"What about the kanks and the corpses?" Zvain and Ruari asked together.

"What about them?" Pavek replied and kept walking.
They caught up soon enough, amid a chorus of bells that alerted the village and brought everyone out to
the verge. Akashia stood in front of the other farmers and druids. Between Guthay's reflection and a
handful of blazing torches, there was enough light for Pavek to read her expression as he drew closer; it
was worried and full of doubt. There was silence until the two of them were close enough to talk in normal
voices.

"The rest are dead. This one's the one you heard. She's unconscious." Pavek glanced over his shoulder,
where Ruari stood with seven kank-leads wound around his wrist. "We thought it would be best if you
roused her. She's New Race."

It was going to be as bad as Pavek feared, maybe worse. Akashia's eyes widened and her nostrils
flared as if she'd gotten whiff of something rotten, but she retreated toward the reed-wall hut where she
lived alone and slightly apart from the others.

"What about all this?" Ruari demanded, shaking the ropes he held and making a few of the bells clatter.

Akashia gave no sign that she had a preference, so Pavek gave the orders: "Pen the kanks. Feed them
and water them well. Strip the corpses before they're buried. Bundle their clothes, their
possessions—everything you find—carefully. Don't get tempted to keep anything. We'll take the bundles
back with us."

" 'We'll take them back'? You've already decided? Who's 'we'?" Akashia asked, walking beside him
now without looking at him or what he carried.

"We: she and I, if she survives. Lord Hamanu sent her and the escort—"

" 'Lord Hamanu?' The Lion's your lord, again?"

"Have mercy, Kashi," Pavek pleaded, using her nickname as he did only when he was flustered. "He
knows where Quraite is: He's proved that, and he's proved he can send a messenger safely across the
Fist—"

"Safely? Is that what you call this?"

Akashia waved a hand past Pavek's elbow. Her sleeve brushed against the dark cloth in his arms,
loosening it and giving her a clear view of the New Race woman's masked face. Pavek held his breath: the
woman was unforgettable, if there would be recognition, it would come now, along with an explosion.

There was no explosion, only a tiny gasp as Akashia pressed her knuckles against her lips. "What
manner of foul magic has the Lion shaped and sent?"

They'd reached the flimsy, but shut, door of Akashia's hut. Pavek's arms were numb, his back burned
with fatigue. He was in no mood to bargain with her outrage. "I told you: she's one of the New Races.
They come from the desert, days south of Urik. The Lion has nothing to do with their making and neither
did Elabon Escrissar."

Pavek waited for her to open the door, but no such gesture was forthcoming—and no surprise there,
he'd been the blundering baazrag who'd dropped Escrissar's name between them.

"What's he got to do with this?"

Pavek put a foot against the door and kicked it open. "I don't"—he began as he carried the woman
across the threshold—"know."

"She's a rotter," Ruari interrupted, adopting Zvain's insults as his own. Heroes didn't have to pen kanks
or dig graves. He did unfold a blanket and spread it across Akashia's cot, but that was probably less
courtesy than a desire to prevent contamination.

Zvain slipped through the open door behind Akashia. Timid and defiant at the same time, he found a
shadow and stood in it with his back against the wall. Scorned boys didn't have chores, either. "I saw her
there," he announced, then cringed when Akashia spun around to glower at him.

But there remained no recognition in her eyes when she looked down at the woman Pavek had laid on
her cot.

"What did she do there?"

"She came at night. The house was full at night. All the rooms were full—"

The boy's voice grew dreamy. His eyes glazed with memories Pavek didn't want to share. "She
was—" he groped for the word. "They're called the eleganta. They entertain behind closed doors."

"A freewoman?" There were gold marks on the woman's skin. Pavek hadn't seen anything like them
before, but he knew they weren't slave scars, and Akashia knew it, too.

"I would die first."

Pavek smiled, as he rarely did, and let his own scar twist his lips into a sneer. "Not everyone is as
determined as you, Kashi. Some of us have to stay alive, and while we live, we do what we have to do to
keep on living."
Ruari spat out a word that belonged in the rankest gutters of the city and implied that the New Race
woman belonged there as well. Without a sound or changing his expression, Pavek spun on his heels.
Before he left the city, there were those in the bureaus who said Pavek had a future as an eighth-rank
intimidator, if he'd ingratiate himself sufficiently with a willing patron. He was a head shorter than the
half-elf, and there was a clear path to the open door, but Ruari stayed right where he was. Once learned,
the nasty tricks of the templar trade couldn't be forgotten. Pavek subjected his friend to withering scrutiny
before saying:

Akashia placed her hands on his arm and tried, futilely, to turn him around. "Stop, please! You've made
your point: we don't understand the city the way you do... she does. Stop. Please?"

He let himself be persuaded. The scar throbbed the way it did when he let his expression pull on it, but
pain wasn't the reason he'd never have made intimidator—and not because he couldn't have found a patron,
precisely as the New Race woman had found one in Escrissar.... Pavek was the one—the only one in the
hut—who truly felt ill. He wanted to leave at a dead run, but couldn't because the woman had awaked.

She sat up with slow, studied and graceful movements, like those of a feral cat. After examining
herself, she looked up. Her open eyes were as astonishing as the rest of her: palest blue-green, like
gemstones, they showed none of the differentiation between outer white and inner color of the established
races. There were only shiny black pupils that swelled dramatically as her vision adjusted to the light of a
single, tiny lamp.

"Who are you? What do you want from us?" Akashia spoke first.

"I am Mahtra." Her voice was strange, too, with little expression and a deep pitch. It seemed to come
from somewhere other than behind her mask. "I have a message for the high templar called Pavek."

Pavek stepped away from the others and drew her attention. "I am Pavek."

Bald brows arched beneath flesh of living gold. Her pupils grew inhumanly large, inhumanly bright, as
she stared him up and down, but mostly at his scarred face. "My lord said I would find an ugly, ugly man."